


Wish I Could Be

by JackieOKCorral



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: (depending on your shipping goggles), Alternate Universe, Discussion of suicidal ideation, Gen, Mermaids, Pre-Slash, kink meme prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2018-03-17
Packaged: 2019-04-01 07:10:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13993119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackieOKCorral/pseuds/JackieOKCorral
Summary: Matt's never fit in, not really. There’s a good reason for that.





	Wish I Could Be

**Author's Note:**

> First things first: I know I checked the "gen" box, but there is some minor Matt/Elektra (in a canon-ish capacity) despite me being a massive Matt/Foggy shipper. Apparently we can't all agree on what "gen" means, but I interpret it as ["fic that isn't focused on the romance, but where pairings can feature in the background."](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenFic)
> 
> This is for a [kinkmeme prompt](https://daredevilkink.dreamwidth.org/8773.html?thread=18563909#cmt18563909):
> 
>  
> 
> _Just give me merman Matt._  
>  _Accident? Temporary? Family secret? Experiment?_  
>  _What happened and was it resolved?_  
>  _Does someone walk in on him in an awkward or compromising situation and get suspicious or find out?_  
>  _Does he have any habits that never made sense to the others?_
> 
>  
> 
> Content warnings for brief discussion of suicidal ideation and a shark getting killed offscreen. This got a little angstier than I intended, but I defy anyone to reread Andersen's The Little Mermaid without some attendant gloom. No beta, so feel free to point out my typos and errors, though I make no promises to fix them in a timely fashion. Title's from "Part of Your World" because honestly, if you're not naming your mermaid AU after lyrics from that song, then what even is the point of it?

When Matt was five, his grandmother offered to take him on a day trip to the beach. Matt had only a fuzzy idea of what “the beach” meant—not many of his friends got out of the neighborhood much—but playing in water sounded like fun.

Jack, however, immediately put a stop to the notion. Nothing his mother could say would budge him.

“Is it that you don’t trust me to watch him?” she demanded finally. “Because for God’s sake, you’re the one who takes him to those fights and everywhere else a little boy shouldn’t go. I can keep him from drowning for an afternoon!”

“No, that isn’t it!” he snapped. “I can’t—” He stopped himself when he noticed Matt, staring at him with wide eyes. “Hey, Matty. Go out and play, okay?”

“Okay.” Matt went out into the hall and closed the door, then pressed his ear to it. Unlike on TV, though, it didn’t work. Jack’s voice was too muffled to make out. Matt eased the door open again.

“—and I don’t know what that means for him,” he heard Jack finish up.

Matt’s grandmother’s voice had gone from irritated to subdued. “You really think he’d do what Maggie did? Jack, he’s not like her.”

“Maggie was a good person, Ma. She couldn’t help what she did. Sometimes—sometimes you can’t tame a wild thing. I never shoulda tried, with her. But Matt’s my boy. I just got to keep him away from that stuff, okay? It’s nothing personal.”

Jack’s mother agreed, and Matt slipped down the stairs. Someone had opened up a fire hydrant out near the corner, so he ran to join the other kids splashing in the spray. As he watched the rainbows forming in the afternoon slant of the sun, he decided the beach didn’t have anything he wanted, anyway.

***

When Matt was 13, the orphanage went on a summer field trip to the aquarium. He was too old, but the cutoff age for staying back was 14 and so off he went, with the elementary schoolers.

It wasn’t as bad as he’d been sure it would be. Mary Sue put her little hand in his and gently tugged him from one display to another, showing him where the Braille signs were and describing the inhabitants of the different tanks with the kind of excitement that he couldn’t help but smile over.

“We’re going to watch them feed the sea otters now,” Sister John said after a couple of hours, coming to join them. “Let’s go, Mary Sue. Matt.”

The feedings were inevitably crowded and noisy, full of overstimulated children and yelling adults. “Can I please just walk around?” he asked.

He tried to keep the desperation out of his tone, but she must have heard it anyway, because she agreed without any argument.

Matt wandered back through the crowd until he got to the shark tank. He could sense them cutting through the water, muscles and deadly teeth. Something about their caged capacity for violence fascinated him.

The bodies between him and the tank shifted, and he was able to press his hand to the thick acrylic glass, feeling the vibrations of their twists and turns. One of them, the biggest, came swimming up to the glass. Behind him, he heard the exclamations of other visitors and their phone cameras clicking. He pressed closer, until his face almost touched the glass. The shark gaped at him, closed its mouth, and gaped again. Its back arched.

Matt’s body shifted in response, muscles tightening. His teeth felt… weird. Like maybe they were sharpening into points. He didn’t want to test them with his tongue and find out for sure.

 _Thud._ The shark rammed into the glass in front of him, startling the watchers into crying out. Matt stayed still and flashed his teeth at it.

_Thud._

_Thud._

“Matthew!” Sister John had come up behind him while his attention was focused on the shark. “Come on and join the rest of us.” She was clearly unsettled, but he hadn’t done anything for her to chastise him about, so she offered her arm while narrating the action and led him away. As they left, he heard the shark hit the glass again.

_Thud._

_Thud._

He dreamed of grappling with it, using only his hands, for months afterward.

***

At the first of every semester, when their student loan money appeared in their bank accounts, Matt and Foggy had a tradition of acting like they were already making the big-shot lawyer salaries, if only for a day. (After that, budgets were back in effect, and the looming sense of impending financial doom reestablished itself with an almost palpable thud.) This time, it was Matt’s turn to pick the restaurant they visited.

“Fancy sushi? Really?” Foggy seemed less than impressed. “Dude, we can get sushi from the bodega down the street, literally.”

“That place’s sushi is _not normal_ , Foggy, I’m pretty sure their cat caught it, and if you ever put it in your mouth I’m going to laugh at you when you have to go to the ER five hours later.” Matt pulled on a nicer shirt. “C’mon, I want sashimi. And this place has more than just fish, plus it has a five-star rating on Yelp.”

He could hear Foggy’s smile in his voice. “All right, fine. But please tell me you’ll eat more than tuna. My mom got worried that you’re going to give yourself mercury poisoning when I told her how many cans you go through in a week.”

Matt started buttoning up his shirt. “I promise I’ll eat more than tuna.”

In point of fact, he did eat more than tuna. He ate horse mackerel, salmon, sea urchin, and scallop, while he and Foggy made a respectable dent in the restaurant’s sake supply. When he started earnestly explaining to their server that he couldn’t have the fresh octopus because he was pretty sure he could feel the neurons in their tentacles still firing while he chewed, and he was against brain consumption, Foggy cut him off with a laughing request for the check.

He leaned too hard on Foggy as they staggered back onto campus. Foggy protested, but not in a serious way. “Just because I’m an inch shorter than you doesn’t mean you can treat me like another cane, Murdock.” His arm stayed strong around Matt’s waist, though.

“My feet hurt.” An understatement. Sometimes it felt like his shoes were knives, cutting into his soles with every bump in the tread. Before the accident it had been all Jack could do to keep his feet covered. After the accident, Matt discovered it hurt worse not to wear shoes, but “worse” was relative. “I don’t want to walk anymore.”

“Well, after all the fish you ate tonight, I wouldn’t be surprised if you grew gills and started swimming places.” Foggy snorted with laughter at the idea. “Maybe you should try it.”

Matt laughed, too. The wind shifted at the same moment, and started coming from the west, the brackish smell of the Hudson carried along with it.

He didn’t realize he’d stopped until Foggy stumbled over his cane, stock-still in front of them. “Whoa, what—” Foggy regained his balance and turned toward him. Matt took a step toward the river. “Buddy, you’re heading the wrong direction. Dorm’s that way.” He pointed with a wobbly finger, then reoriented. “I mean, that way.”

“I know…” Matt took another step, ignoring the stabbing pain in his feet. The scent of salt caressed him, seeming to flow through his clothes and soothing all the too-sensitive skin beneath. On the same breeze, beneath all the city-sound and water flow, he thought he heard the faintest pulse of music carried in the river’s current, traveling out to sea.

Nameless longing assailed him. Tears sprang to his eyes.

For a moment, he couldn’t breathe, his lungs weren’t working, something was wrong, his body was _wrong_ —

Foggy’s hand clasped his arm, warm and sure, and suddenly everything slotted back into its usual place. Matt inhaled, one trembling breath after another, too fast, the oxygen making his head spin. Or maybe that was the sake.

Foggy spoke, so quietly that Matt wondered if another person could have heard him. “You okay?”

Matt nodded, but the motion dislodged the tears and sent them racing down his cheeks. Foggy made a wordless sound of distress and held on tighter.

“I’m okay.” Matt took a slower, deeper breath and wiped his cheeks with his free hand, resisting the weird impulse to lick the moisture away. “I’m okay.” He summoned a smile that he hoped looked genuine. “Too much sake, not enough sleep. I’m fine. Sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize.” Foggy folded Matt’s cane, then tucked Matt’s hand into the curve of his elbow, putting it in its usual guiding position. “I’ll get us back home, all right? You can lean on me all you want.”

Part of Matt wanted to growl in protest and wrench his hand away. He recognized coddling for what it was. The rest of him took charge, though, and he found himself hanging onto Foggy’s arm like a life preserver. The rest of their trip back still felt like walking on dagger points.

The music didn’t fade until after he fell asleep.

***

Elektra was the only one he told about the ocean’s song, and even then it was only because she wanted to take him to the Caribbean.

“I can’t go to the beach,” he said, lazy as a cat in a patch of sunlight while she overlay him in her bed.

“Don’t be ridiculous, of course you can.” She punctuated the declaration with a quick kiss to his mouth. “I’ll buy your ticket with frequent flier miles, if you like, so it won’t cost me a thing. Your ridiculous aversion to me spoiling you aside, we’ll have a lovely time.”

“It’s not that, it’s…” He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, trying to figure out a way to explain it. “It’s dangerous.”

Elektra cocked her head. “You’re joking.”

“No, I’m not. I—sometimes, when I’m close to the ocean, I feel like if I could just set foot in it, I would never leave it again.”

He expected Elektra to joke, to say that everyone felt that way about the ocean and that was why beach trips were so popular, but instead she sat up. “Now why wouldn’t you return to me, Matthew?” She must have seen his wariness on his face, because she coaxed, “Go on. Tell me.”

So he did. He told her about his father’s half-heard and less-remembered words, the shark, the way the sea called to him, the way his feet hurt and hurt without remedy. At the end of his confession, she made a contemplative sound and caressed his hair back. “You make it sound mythological. I’ve heard stories like this before.”

“It’s stupid.” He turned his face away from her, half-hiding it in the pillow beneath his head.

“It’s not. You’re too exceptional to ever quite fit in here on land. Perhaps you would, in the ocean.”

“I could never.” Matt gathered the hair at the nape of her neck into his fist and pulled her down until he could nip at her chin. “I could never fit into a world without you.”

Her breathing sped up as he turned her head to plant biting kisses along her jawline. “You’ll never have to try.”

***

“Disappointing,” Fisk pronounced. Matt could hear his footsteps, but the blows to his head had disrupted his senses enough that he couldn’t tell if Fisk was walking toward him or away, until Fisk spoke again. “Wesley?”

The click of a safety being released. Matt groped for the metal he sensed, just past the easy reach of his fingertips, and threw, a second before Wesley pulled the trigger.

It was enough. Enough to throw Wesley’s aim off, and he was lucky, Wesley apparently didn’t know that his chances of hitting a moving target were better if he stood still. Matt crashed through the window and out into the night.

The moment he hit the water below, the world went silent.

For an instant, Matt thought he was dead. Wesley’s bullets had found their target and his body had just been a little slow to catch up with reality. He couldn’t even hear his own heartbeat.

Because his heart was _changing._ It hadn’t stopped, it was… shifting in his chest, and his lungs were moving too, they were pressing against his ribs like they were trying to break free of their cage and his ears were shrinking in on themselves, closing up like flowers in reverse bloom. His body density shrank, too, muscle turning to fat and bones thinning. All the changes added another layer of agony onto what had already been an overwhelming storm of pain. He shrieked, but the sound was silenced by the river.

From far away—miles distant in the ocean, if his newly sealed-off ears could be trusted, though they probably couldn’t—a scream echoed through the water as if in answer.

Somehow, he made it to another pier, far enough away that Fisk’s men didn’t catch him. Somehow, he dragged himself out of the water and gasped for air through his mouth, trying not to taste all the pollution, until his lungs shifted back into place and his heart started pumping his blood correctly once more.

Somehow, he staggered home and fell down his own stairs.

That night, he lived in fever dreams of voices singing _return to us, we’ve waited too long_ , while cool arms enfolded him and the ocean’s currents pulled him deep, deep, deeper, until the noise on land faded to nothing and all that was left was the sound of two-chambered hearts, beating slow and steady.

***

Later, when Foggy finished the leaving he’d begun the night he discovered the masked man in his partner’s apartment—

When Matt and Stick buried Elektra—

When Karen told him to stay the hell away from her for a while, after he confessed the truth—

When he locked away the suit—

Matt spent entire nights sitting on warehouse roofs, face turned to the east, to the ocean, listening for the call. He had nothing left on land. But somehow he never quite got around to just going to the ocean’s edge and walking in. Maybe he was afraid that he’d keep walking even if it turned out his body’s transformation had been a hallucination.

Maybe he was afraid that the voices would change their song, would sing that everything about him was too much, too much, and the only way they could save themselves was to keep him far from them.

Every step home felt like a knife wound, after those nights. He barely noticed; compared to the heartache, it was nothing.

***

After Elektra returned, after the world collapsed on them, he awoke underwater.

Later, when he tried to explain to Foggy, to Karen, to Jessica (even though he could practically hear the latter rolling her eyes as she begged him _not_ to try), he could never get it right. He could explain the unceasing brushing on his skin, the way it soothed rather than irritated, how it woke him after what seemed like a brief nap. The fluctuations in cold that never seemed too great for him to handle, because he had grown body fat as he slept, and even at the deepest depths he was warm. The tug of the ocean’s currents. The cool, sharp-scaled hands of the other mers, their constant touch on his body until they seemed to understand that he could track them without it. His mouth filled with rows of teeth, one behind the other, sharp enough to have cut his human tongue out, except that it, too, had changed, becoming immobile thick cartilage good only for ripping chunks out of the fish he ate. How odd it felt to taste with the sides of his mouth and throat instead. The constant thrumming of water moving across the ocean floor, creatures swimming, ships overhead and, more rarely, with him underwater.

Those things, he could put into words.

The rest, though… How could he describe that feeling of absolute belonging that grew the longer he spent with the pod, how the slightest flicker of movement telegraphed from the forefront resulted in unified motion without thought being necessary? The collective _knowing_ without needing words, the understanding that bound them all together. The songs they sang to the other pods, miles away, about the time before Men, about their brothers and sisters who had washed ashore and never found their way back, absorbed into the graceless mass of humanity.

His mother’s scent, moving through his nares, in-out-in, familiar as a lullaby, close beside him, always.

Maggie had done her best to explain how he got there, but like Matt, she couldn’t seem to quite convey the whole truth. She pressed her head to his, and he could feel her thoughts within his own mind, but her points of sensory reference were so foreign. She didn’t have a real concept of time passing, or of compartmentalizing it into hours and weeks. Everything was either _now_ or _not-now._ Her primary way of experiencing the world was through her senses of touch and echolocation, and that at least was familiar, but it did little to convey the answers to questions like, _Why did you leave_ or _How did you find me_ or _How long have I been here with you?_ She didn’t know. Matt had been not-with-her, and then she had been called, by frail human lungs, to the side of a ship not far from where she once had played on land, and his broken, almost-dead body had been placed gently in the water with-her. She had healed him, and now he would stay.

 _With-me with-me with-me,_ she told him, the thought like a heartbeat.

And Matt succumbed to the undertow. _With-you,_ he agreed.

***

It took a long time for Matt to remember the past as past. It was _not-now_ and thus nothing he had to concern himself about.

But sometimes the merfolk would indulge their curiosity about what humans were doing, on their big ships, and surface to listen to their strange, clunky speech that fell through the air like hailstones and failed to communicate half of what it should. On one such night, Matt floated on the waves, a little farther from the others so he could be sure he was out of the reach of the light he knew was pouring from the decks, and idly flipped through his mind, looking for the right words.

A cruise ship. That’s what this was.

Coming up with the English term did something, changed his thoughts just a half-turn on the compass, pointing to a different north. He tuned into the conversations onboard, listening to accents and references. They were from New York City. This was a day-trip cruise, for a private party, and they would be returning to the harbor after midnight. A lot of wealthy and influential people, but the sort who had worked and still worked for their money, not the sort who had inherited. He heard meetings being set, terms being negotiated, all through smiling mouths and clenched teeth. Very few of them sounded like genuine enjoyment.

“You win one little Pulitzer and suddenly they’ll let you in anywhere,” a woman said, her voice teasing, and he focused on her because she actually sounded happy.

“I’m going to talk to Jeri and get her to raise her standards,” a man responded, but he sounded just as happy as his companion. They wandered over to the railing and leaned on it, side by side, forearms resting on the metal. “Did you try the caviar?”

“It tastes like fish eggs,” she complained.

“It grows on you.” Matt could pick up the motion as the man handed something to the woman. “Here, have mine.” But something was wrong, because the laughter had faded, leaving only weariness in his tone.

The woman noticed, too. “Foggy?”

Foggy—

 _Foggy._ And the woman was _Karen_.

Matt came close to shouting before he remembered how they’d parted. He sank back into the waves but kept listening.

“—sometimes wonder if I’m ever going to be able to believe he’s really gone,” Karen was saying.

“He is. I know he has to be.” Foggy sighed and buried his face in one hand with a groan of frustration. “I’m sorry. Every time we meet up we rehash this, and it sucks every single time. I should be congratulating you on that article series that won you the Pulitzer, not bringing up a party I once went to with a dead guy, twelve years ago.”

“You sent me a gorgeous bouquet when I won the Pulitzer. The entire office thought I’d been hiding my boyfriend from them.” That sentence had an odd quaver in it, but Matt thought no one besides him could’ve picked it up. “And Matt’s more than just a dead guy. We both loved him. It’s normal to miss him, to wish he were here with us.”

“I do miss him.” Foggy’s voice was still muffled by his hand, but Matt could hear the dampness in it, dampness that had nothing to do with the ocean only feet away. “But I don’t wish he were with us, because I guess that wasn’t what he wanted, in the end. I just—I just wish he could’ve had what he did want. Whatever that was.”

There was a long silence, and then Karen asked, “Do you ever think maybe he did get what he wanted, when that building collapsed?”

Another, longer silence. Matt waited.

Finally, Foggy breathed in, breathed out, disorganized and shallow, and Matt recognized the sound of someone who’d had the wind knocked out of him, but Foggy’s voice was steady when he said, “Yeah. Sometimes, I do.”

Matt turned tail, so fast that his fins smacked the water hard enough to sting, and hurtled down, down, down, away from the pain he’d caused.

***

Foggy and Karen had reawoken Matt’s humanity, for better or for worse, and now Matt was out of sync with the rest of the pod. He was only a half-second behind their collective motion, but it was enough for them to notice, for some of the bigger and stronger to prod him into place with challenge in their touch.

Maggie wanted to know what was wrong, although her questioning thoughts weren’t quite so precise as the words Matt had started translating them into. He showed her what he’d heard, the grief and hurt, but she didn’t understand why that would still bother him _now_ when it was _not-now_. The humans didn’t swim with their pod. Let their own care for them, as Maggie cared for Matt.

 _I am their own,_ he thought. _Or I was._

Matt tried to let his sense of time be submerged once more, but he found himself tracking it even without the sun’s heat reaching him. The merfolk followed a 25-hour circadian rhythm, he discovered.

At last, his distraction led to near-disaster. The pod had surrounded a great white that had attacked them, and was in the process of destroying it, when Matt dodged left too late and triggered a chaotic chain reaction. Bodies slamming into one another, the shark flailing about, one of the babies who had been playing obliviously on the outskirts of the skirmish nearly suffering fatal consequences.

After the shark was dealt with, the pod reassembled itself into its usual cohesive unit, except Matt, who swam a little distance away to silently lose his shit. The others seemed not to have noticed that the entire thing was his fault, or if they had, they no longer cared. An advantage of living almost entirely in the present, and one he didn’t deserve.

He missed going to confession with a sudden fierce ache. How long had it been since the last time he’d received Communion? He’d definitely missed the Eucharist during Easter season, and that realization made his heart twist in his chest. Just once a year, that was the least the Church required, and he hadn’t done it, because he’d been shirking his responsibilities for a dream.

That was all this had been. A dream, the culmination of all those years in his childhood wondering about his mother, fantasizing that she would come to reclaim him from the orphanage (while half the time also fantasizing about rejecting her, the way she’d rejected him). Fantasizing that one day, he’d be part of a world that fit.

In many ways, this interlude had shown him how many parts of himself weren’t uniquely, terribly strange and wrong. They were just… mer. But he didn’t belong here _more_ than he belonged on land.

Danny might have continued Daredevil’s exploits for a while after Matt disappeared, but he couldn’t have done so this long. _This city needs me in that mask,_ he’d told Foggy. When had he stopped believing it?

Even as the question floated into his awareness, he knew the answer. He had never stopped. He’d just forgotten. And now that memory had returned, he was responsible for what he did with it.

***

Maggie didn’t understand. Neither did the pod. _With-us_ , they cajoled. _With-us_. A sense of empty spaces which should be filled. _There are too few left, stay._ When they realized he would not be moved, they accompanied him to the shore.

Matt followed the taste of the pollution he still remembered all the way up to the harbor. He’d have to steal clothes off of one of the ships.

Before he climbed aboard the darkened deck of the one he chose—a wealthy person’s toy, so much so that they might never even notice the missing clothes—he turned to say goodbye to his mother. Merfolk didn’t kiss each other, but she remembered the gesture and returned it when he pressed his lips to her cheek. The pod pressed close, the reassuring group motion surrounding him and making him one of them, one last time.

All at once they were swimming away. He was left alone, clinging to the side of the boat with hands that cut at the paint as he scrambled out of the water. When his tear ducts reformed, he realized he’d been crying the entire time.

But he walked all the way back to Hell’s Kitchen, and his feet didn’t hurt a bit.

***

Six months later, Matt and Foggy signed the lease on their new office. Karen stopped by on their first day in, bringing a saltwater aquarium and two clownfish along with all the accoutrements.

“I named them Nelson and Murdock,” she announced proudly, sticking the bags holding the fish into the water to acclimate.

“How sweet,” Matt murmured. He couldn’t help his smile, which sort of ruined the sarcasm.

Foggy bent to peer at the fish, circling in their tiny confinements. “There’s only one sea clown working as a lawyer in this office, Karen. I’m a happy land dweller.”

“Yeah, but these are really young, and since they’re raised in the same tank, the salesperson said they had a good chance of becoming a mated pair when they grow up, so I figured it was appropriate.” Matt’s smile grew to a grin, and Foggy sputtered, but Karen continued as if she hadn’t noticed either reaction. “Also—”

She held out something small and plastic to Foggy. He took it and told Matt, “It’s a gift card for the bagel place down the street.”

“I remembered you saying, the first time he talked you into this, bagels were a pressing concern of yours.” Karen laughed as Foggy gave her a smacking kiss on the cheek.

Matt waited for Foggy to back off before pulling her into a one-armed hug against his side. “Thank you. I’d ask you keep an eye out for a legal assistant to take your place, but no one could measure up.”

“Damn right.” She rested her head on his shoulder even after he let go, relaxed and unbothered. Foggy stepped to his other side and leaned back against the desk next to him. Karen started a playful discussion with Foggy about whether or not drinking the eel at Josie’s was a form of cannibalism for Matt, and they argued back and forth without moving away from him. He felt their breathing, syncing with his, and the press of their bodies on either side, and let himself belong.


End file.
